News archive

What can files tell us about the Holocaust? At the end of August 2016 the German Federal Archives, a partner in the transnational EHRI project, held a 10-day archive seminar on methods for evaluating German language documents with a Holocaust context. ITS staff member Akim Jah gave a talk about the archival holdings of...

The German occupiers deported Julian Banaś from Poland to Germany for forced labor. He never returned to his wife and three children. Where he was deported, under which circumstances he lived and died: his family had learned nothing about that until his granddaughter sent an inquiry to the International Tracing Service...

On 9 September 2016 County Commissioner Dr. Reinhardt Kubat had a closer look into the work of the International Tracing Service (ITS). “An important activity, not only for former victims of persecution and their descendants, but also for coming generations who need to understand the past”, emphasized Kubat, who has...

As of 2016 Sir Eric Pickles is the Special Envoy of the British Government for Post-Holocaust Issues and Representative of the United Kingdom in the International Commission for the ITS. At the beginnung of September he travelled to Bad Arolsen to learn more about the archival holdings and current projects of the ITS.

The original intention US American John Bendetson had in visiting the archive of the International Tracing Service (ITS) was to do some research for friends and acquaintances. But then pieces of his own personal family history emerged unexpectedly, and much to his surprise he found himself holding a copy of his birth...

The ITS exhibit "‘Where should we have gone after the liberation?‘ Transit Stations - Displaced Persons after 1945“ was opened in the Hessian State Archives in Darmstadt. This is now the sixth station of the exhibit that will be on display there until 24 October 2016. The exhibit is dedicated to the fates of the more...

Forced labor in the historical context and from a transnational perspective: in August 2016 young educators from Germany and South Korea met at the Nazi Forced Labor Documentation Center in Berlin to discuss this topic. Akim Jah, Research Associate in the Pedagogy and Education Branch of the International Tracing...

Dan Stone, Professor of Modern History at Royal Holloway University of London, spent four weeks in the archive of the ITS researching for his project ‟Tracing the Holocaust”. For this project the scholar has been using the digital copy of the ITS archive accessible at the Wiener Library in London. At the ITS in Bad...

In the summer of 1945 two Displaced Persons Camps (DP camps) were established near the liberated Concentration Camp Bergen-Belsen: one for Jewish survivors, one for Polish. Lists and registration cards preserved in the archive of the ITS document the names of individuals, some of whom kept waiting in the camp for their...

A folder containing letters, photos and family documents was Franziska Gerstmeier’s motivation to retrace the fate of the family of her deceased husband, Gad Klein. His Jewish grandparents, three aunts and an uncle were murdered or had died in concentration camps. Two children in the Klein family had managed to escape....